What sucks, who sucks and you suck

Placeholder: WAS Performance Bugs

2007-04-27

WebSphere Application Server on Sun/UNIX has bugs in the performance viewer and convertScriptCompatibility command.

Performance viewer is built into the admin console from V6, using SVG for graphs. Right idea, but is the technology ready yet? It’s slow when displaying many parameters and can seriously degrade browser responsiveness.

Performance viewer won’t display graphs by default as it requires an X11 server process. Add java.awt.headless=true as a custom property or define to the JVM configuration for the server1 app server (standalone) or dmgr server (ND). Only bug/fix logged on IBM site refers to z/OS.

convertScriptCompatibility creates a new web container thread pool associated with the new transports, called something like “Default_Transport_To_Channel_pool” (leaving the old “WebContainer” pool obsolete, confusingly). However, this pool does not have defined sizing and defaults to 1-5 threads rather than 10-50 with 3500s timeout, causing severe performance degradation under load. Symptom is app server processing requests but taking a long time with new requests (e.g. over a minute) and not utilising server capacity. FIX: go to Application Server -> Thread Pools and set sizing for the new pool(s).

How the hell are you supposed to log bugs like these with IBM? As support calls (oh gawd…)?

[This is a placeholder entry to capture the gist of a post that I plan to fill in with more detail later.]